


Don’t tell them

by argonautic



Category: The Grand Tour (TV) RPF, Top Gear (UK) RPF
Genre: Blood and Injury, Character Death, Graphic Description of Corpses, M/M, graphic depictions of injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:09:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22526854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/argonautic/pseuds/argonautic
Summary: Jeremy is about to lounge onto his sofa with a glass of rosé in his hand, cheering on a tremendously good idea he’s just had while under the shower, when his mobile rings.
Relationships: Jeremy Clarkson/James May
Comments: 5
Kudos: 18





	Don’t tell them

**Author's Note:**

> Again: graphic depiction of injuries, and first excruciating steps in grief.

Jeremy is about to lounge onto his sofa with a glass of rosé in his hand, cheering on a tremendously good idea he’s just had while under the shower, when his mobile rings.

"Wilman! You know, I was going to ring you, good thing you've-"

"Jeremy" he cuts him off, and Jeremy feels something odd in the way Andy articulates his name. Something wrong.

"What." he asks, alarmed.

"James has had a serious accident."

_Oh hell, James._ "How serious? Where is he now?"

Two seconds pass before Andy answers: "They weren’t able to resuscitate him."

_Oh no_. Then, it's like everything around him freezes as he realises the tragic meaning of Andy’s words. _No. Not James. It can't be. James can’t be dead._

Jeremy hears Andy swallowing down a sob before going on: "They said he was still breathing and rushed him to the hospital, but he’d never woke up. It’s half an hour I'm here at the hospital, I haven’t been allowed to see him yet."

"Tell me where you are" Jeremy almost commands, while grabbing his jacket, wallet, and keys, all with the one hand that's not holding his phone. Andy gives him the address, then adds: "Don't rush. There's no need at this point."

  
Oh, if he rushes. Jeremy wobbly runs to his car, throwing everything but the keys on the backseat, and starts it. He pushes the gear lever into reverse, abruptly enough to risk breaking it, gets the car out of the drive and pushes his foot down. _James. Not James._ Rather him, but not James, he keeps repeating along the way, not James. _Not James. Because –_ and it’s a thought that has never came to him so plainly before - _James is mine. He can’t be dead_. James and his hideous striped sweaters, James and the nonsensical cars he keeps buying, James and his revulsion of being touched by anyone – apart from him. _So, please, no, not James. There’s a lot of people around who would be better be dead. Rather me, but not James,_ he keeps thinking while driving through London like he’s being chased. _What if I crash right now, and die, and James comes back to life? Can it be done? Because James can’t be dead. Not my James._

He’s driving in what it feels to him like a post-apocalyptic scenario, each of his senses blurred, like the glasses of his car were foggy and the sounds around him muffled by an out-of-season snowfall that somehow smells like ashes in his nose, and he can’t hear anything else beside his pounding heartbeat. He has to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a small group of youngsters at a pedestrian crossing but, as he is going to rant about them for taking so long to get to the other side, a glimpse of awareness makes him reconsider his behaviour - _no need to rush, James is dead_ – and thus he resolves to drive at an acceptable speed all the time up to the hospital, still unable to think about anything else but James.

Once there, he rings Andy for directions and finally finds him sat in a small waiting room set up in the corner of a corridor. Richard is there too, crouched beside an empty chair, head hidden between the knees, his fingers intertwined over his nape.

They don’t share a single word: Jeremy’s raging pain clenches his jaw, his eyes are swollen, red and wet, but still he’s not crying, not a drop has run down his cheeks, it's just a thick, shiny layer that covers his eyes and restrains from breaking into tears. Neon lights reflect in Jeremy’s blue irises as he keeps staring blankly at a random point on the wall. _James. My James. How could you? You were mine, James, and now you’re not anymore._

A couple of minutes passes before a nurse approaches Andy: she places her hand on his shoulder and composedly says “You can see him now, if you want”. They look at each other, as to silently decide a turn, but Richard is still crouched and Andy stays sit under the nurse’s touch, so Jeremy mumbles “I’m going first”. He follows the nurse along a couple of hallways and through a coded door, until she stops in front of a closed room. ‘Room B’, Jeremy reads on the plate. “Must have been a terrible accident” the nurse explains, “Please be prepared, he suffered serious injuries”. _He suffered, that's all_ , Jeremy mentally sums it up, wincing at that thought, then nods to the nurse.

She opens the door and let Jeremy step inside. He keeps looking down, like he’s investigating the texture of linoleum floor, to avoid getting a glimpse of anything before he’s ready to. Once he hears the door close behind him, he takes a deep breath and turns his gaze up to finally look at James for what he realises will be the last time.

And what he sees it’s a transfigured James: the well-known features are concealed under smudges in all the shades of red, like the make-up girls have gone completely mad, but somehow it’s still unmistakably James, his James, lying still, tucked under a pristine white sheet perfectly folded just below the chin. James is not the mess of tubes and wires and beeping stuff that was Richard, when he crashed. James is alone. James is silent. James is dead.

Jeremy gets closer to the bed, and he now sees clearly the dark bruises around James’s eyes, the swollen eyelids, the large dressing soaked with blood that goes up to his ear and continues under the sheet for who knows how far, the scrapes and bruises scattered all over James’s skin. He notices the traces of dried blood along the wrinkles and the marks on the small part of neck he can see, like a sprinkle of Port-wine stains he knows James never had. Or hickeys – _oh James, the piss I’d take out of you if those were hickeys,_ he thinks behind a feeble smirk. Jeremy’s look then moves to James’s hair, that is looking worse than usual. But, while automatically starting to think of a good metaphor to mock him for that, Jeremy spots a drip of dried blood next to James’s earlobe, getting lost beyond his hairline. And the edge of a bandage, partially detached, behind his nape. And a streak of gore almost on the top of his head, parting his hair in uneven halves. _So, for once, bad hair is not your fault, James - my poor James_.

Jeremy tries to detect the lines of James’s body hidden under the sheet, catching sight of the shape of a hand, and instinctively places his palm over it. It feels weird to his touch, so he lifts the side of the sheet away, to check what he's actually touching. And regrets it. Because he sees how James’s arm, now uncovered, is bruised and torn, twisted in an unnatural position, that looks so painful that it’s giving Jeremy’s own arm a shock, going from the shoulder down. He records that what he has felt under the sheet is just a finger probe left there, disconnected from the monitor, now useless, but he doesn’t care about it anymore. He quickly draws the sheet back to cover the devastating injury, leaving out only James’s pinkie, swollen but miraculously unharmed, and he curls his own around it. It feels cold and unpleasantly stiff, but Jeremy doesn’t withdraw his hand despite the miserable feedback, with the afterimage of what James’s arm has become still in his eyes.

_He never woke up, Andy said, it’s a good thing_ , Jeremy naively thinks, _because that shattered arm must hurt like hell and James doesn’t deserve it_ , he doesn’t want James to suffer, his James. And then he realises what he’s just thought and instantly almost throws up, disgusted by the outrage he’s just conceived, _because James never woke up, James is dead, and perhaps James wasn’t dead yet when his arm got mangled like that, and James suffered all the same and James is not here anymore_. _James is dead._

Broken by that thought, Jeremy rabidly draws the sheet away to uncover James’s body, driven by the overwhelming will to see what’s the extent of the injuries James had suffered, to know the variety of insults his body has had to deal with, to understand the amount of pain he’s gone through. And it’s like unveiling a classic statue, only to discover it’s been knocked down and vandalised. At that sight Jeremy eventually cries, freely, tears flowing down his cheeks and soaking the neck of his shirt, and sobs in front of his James, that lies there looking like a doll just recovered from the dump, damaged and dirty against the immaculate linen of the bed.

Among the tears, Jeremy sees how the marks he glimpsed on James’s neck were only the further traces of the Pollock’s in purple that covers the largest part of his chest, darker on the right side. He wants to believe that at least some of the bruises he can see were those mysterious ones you spot by chance when having a shower and you don’t know where you got them, but even if so, even if all the bruises he sees were miraculously pain-free, there’s still the devastated arm, black and yellow and bent, reminding him of an overripe banana - and Jeremy gets he won’t be able to eat bananas again from now on. His gaze follows the line of stiches emerging from under the dressing, shiny metal staples keeping edges of flesh together in a queue than runs over abrasions, bruises and minor transversal cuts, up to the point where James’s elbow should be, undetectable under the tumid swelling affecting the whole limb. _My poor James, how much did this hurt?_

He keeps scanning James’s body, and spots a long cut down his groin; _hey James, that was a close shave for your cock_ , he would have had the chance to say, among the tears still falling. He can’t help seeing that the position of James’s right foot doesn’t match the right knee’s, with the swollen ankle marking the inconsistency. Looking at the bottom of James’s body, where it sinks into the white mattress, he glimpses a thin line of dark stains that, like a sort of bluish moss, seem to be trying to climb up James’s side, underneath the skin, as a livid watercolour slowly soaking the once pinkish background of James’s skin, now turned pale. Something coming from down under, aiming to invade James’s body, as to claim it for itself. 

Jeremy squints to push his last tears out and wipes them away, then he carefully put the sheet back on James’s body, with a defiance of the gory scenery he didn’t know he had, and when he leans in to adjusts the fold just under James’s chin, as perfectly levelled as it was before, he lingers there, his face close to James’s bruised one. At last, he gently places a soft kiss on the cold lips: “James”, he says, looking at him as if he was still responsive, “there are Wilman and Hammond waiting to see you, please don’t tell them I’ve just kissed you, ok? See you mate”, and walks out of the room.


End file.
